Why Tipped Employees should get at least Minimum Wage – Yes
I definitely think that service-industry employees who get tips should be paid at least the minimum wage. Where I've lived and worked, that category was almost exclusively populated by waiters and waitresses, although it could be different elsewhere. I understand that some restaurants get enough customers for the waitstaff to earn enough tips to live off of, but that is not the case everywhere. Honestly, I don't think that's the case in very many places at all! I've worked in the service industry for several years in various restaurants and I can tell you that the waitstaff works every bit as hard as the rest of the wage-paid kitchen employees, if not more. Unlike the back-of-house staff, we had to deal with the customers, bring out heavy plates of food, and clean up after they left. This might not sound like much, but trust me, it is! Anyone who's ever cleaned up a table after small children had been there and gotten trash on that table *and* the one next to it knows that it's no easy feat! Also, where I've worked, we were expected to do a lot of side work and help everyone else out too. I have a scar on my right arm where I burned myself taking the funnel off of the tea urn too fast, which was my fault, but that's not the point. The point is that I was making tea in addition to rolling silverware, running dishes (yes, we had to work the dish room too on some nights), making salads, and literally running our butts off. With a few exceptions (like cooks and the salad bar), there wasn't any such thing as 'that's not my job'. I'm not trying to say that the other employees don't work hard too, but they get at least minimum wage. So should waitstaff.
Most waitstaff really can't rely on getting enough tips to pay essential bills like rent and utilities, because there is no real way to tell what their tips are going to be one week to the next, or even one *night* to the next. You can't budget if you don't know how much you're going to make. If tip-earning employees had an opportunity to get at least minimum wage, they would have a steady income to be able to budget with. It might not be much, but it's a lot more than $2.13 an hour, which is the standard pay rate here. Consider also that many of us worked restaurant jobs while in college and paying for school, and you have even *more* need for at least some steady income. We were still charged taxes on the $2.13/hour, so there were several times when I was basically *paying* to work because it was really slow and we didn't have many customers to wait on. It's kind of hard to get tips when there's no one there to give them. My paychecks were usually $0 because of taxes. If I'd been paid minimum wage, I'd at least have had *something* to put in the bank.
So, I believe that waitstaff and other tipped employees should be paid at least minimum wage. We certainly do enough work to earn it, and we can't really live off of tips if we don't know what we're going to get in order to budget. There's a saying in that industry - you can often tell who has worked in customer service and who has not. Anyone who's worked in this industry knows that the job is at least worth minimum wage for what it entails.
